In
2005, LTC Al Bishop, a West Point professor, wrote an article
in Army Times elucidating the reasons why the
Don't Ask Don't Tell policy should be repealed.
At the time, few if any active or retired heterosexual
military personnel had spoken out in favor of open
service by gay personnel in our armed forces. Since then, 28 retired Admirals and Generals have spoken out, as well as General Shalikashvili
-a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, as well as others. LTC BIshop was among the first with the courage to
challenge the general wisdom of the time. Now retired, Al Bishop has recently spoken out again regarding Advocacy for gay rights. His speech, on February 8th 2008, at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, below, speaks eloquently of his ongoing belief in human dignity.

ADVOCACY
FOR THE GLBT COMMUNITY
Sixth Annual Kent Estes JUSTICE FOR ALL Conference
University of Nebraska at Kearney
LTC (USA RET) Al Bishop

It is appropriate
that we consider the struggles of the Lesbian, Gay,
Bisexual, Transexual, Questioning persons (LGBTQ) in a
conference headlined by the word justice. We Americans
tend to think we have something of a corner on
justice, that the word America somehow subsumes the
word justice because we regard ourselves as the most
just nation on the planet. But even if we are the most
just society yet conceived and formed, we are
imperfect, and our unstudied declarations about the
glories and the reach of our justice only get in the
way. America is a great nation; I feel particularly
fortunate to be an American. America is a place where
the ideas of liberty, respect for others, and an
unquestioned positive belief in individual citizens
exercise themselves in the day-to-day life of the body
politic. I am a white heterosexual man, and the
America I experience is not the America known by, say,
a black lesbian woman. Our justice, our union, remains
imperfect.

And the injustices,
and let’s be clear, that is what they are—acts
failing to conform to our best and most deeply held
notions of justice for all—experienced by the LBGT
community are not only or even primarily the problems
of the LGBT community. Sure, they suffer the most.
They are denied the right to have their affections
sanctioned by ceremony. They are often refused medical
insurance for their partners. Should a beloved partner
of many years become unable to manage their own
affairs, the able partner is often shunted to the side
while "family members" who may have rejected
the "differently oriented" and now disabled
son or daughter make life and death decisions in
conference with the doctors. And these same unloving
family members may go on to disburse funds, sell
properties, and make final arrangements without regard
for the deepest affections of either the dying one or
of the partner. In this way the deepest, most
intimate, parts of their personality and their
humanity are sometimes consistently ignored by family
members, denied standing before the law and
institutions, and denounced as sinful and outrageous
in the same fashion as Hester Prynne in Samuel
Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. This is mere prejudice
carried out on a large scale all across America
everyday. Whose problem is this?

Martin Luther King
Jr. told us that "injustice anywhere is a threat
to justice everywhere" and that though "the
arc of history is long, it bends toward justice."
America ought by now to have learned that any time we
take counsel of our fears or unexamined traditions, we
end badly. Any old review, however brief, of our
treatment toward women and persons of color illustrate
the point. And the flashes of religious intolerance we
have long held give pause. The Salem Witch Trials,
stocks and pillories, witch dunkings, and the unloving
, unforgiving Christian compassion, shown toward gay
persons ought to revolt thinking citizens. But we have
a long history of the Ku Klux Klan, resistance toward
Catholic Presidents, and so on that we should all work
against. The principal question for citizens of a
democracy is not the question of whether a given act
conforms with one’s privately held convictions about
God’s commandments; no, the principal question is
one of whether a given act conforms to our most
carefully considered judgments of justice for all
citizens. The problem is Our problem, We, All of us.
And it is made worse because the burden of change and
redress is forced upon the victims while most of us
sit comfortably and idly by basking in the enjoyment
of our hetero-liberty. We are supposed to be a diverse
yet essentially homogeneous society in that we share
common views about justice for all, about the
blessings of liberty. We do not.

If America is to
become more fully American we must stop the
homophobia, stop the prejudice, and embrace all
citizens—straight or gay—as the individual human
beings and citizens they most certainly are.